A tryst with remote interns
About the Author: Avni Barwale is the founder of Pigtales, a startup in Mumbai. Old photographs remind you the story of your child’s special moments. Pigtales encapsulates these memories into books to make them last forever.
We decided to hire interns for some design work for our brand. Since our books are the most important part, we worked on the finer details and wanted someone to put in their illustrations and bring that freshness into the books. This is how we worked with our interns:
1. Remote access:
Working over the internet without the restriction of office space is fun and challenging. We managed to do this with Utkarsha. There was the issue of time zones as one member of our team resided in Canada and rest of us were in India. However, we made sure that the remote access did not hamper the creativity and worked together to create a wonderful book.
2. New ideas:
We gave our intern the design brief and some sample ideas for the work and asked her to come up with creative ways of portraying the idea. Sometimes this worked and sometimes we gave more concrete directions. Brainstorming and coming up with new topics and designs helped along the way.
3. Deadlines:
We were working with a one-month deadline to complete one book, which in itself provided the challenge and made it exciting for the interns to complete the projects. Interns were working part-time along with school and we realized that some of them worked well under pressure and some didn’t. So, we tapped into their individual capabilities and managed to get good results.
4. Regular conversations:
A hard thing about remote working is listening to ideas and explaining your thoughts. We had regular conversations that made this possible. Providing flexibility in terms of timings and understanding commitments and expectations of the interns, helped us in building the trust to make this work.
We did face difficulties as the interns were young and did not have the required design experience, but it was a great learning experience as the concept of handling remote interns was new for us too. In spite of this, we managed to get good results with persistence and patience. We plan to hire some more interns for the next batch of books we would create in the upcoming months.
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